Dubai
In a world of WhatsApp, Kik, WeChat, Telegram and Facebook Messenger, a new messaging app — Sila — is propping up from the Arab World to challenge the giants.
AppMahal, a Palestine start-up focused on creating mobile applications for users in the Arab world, is bullish about the company’s prospects.
Speaking to Gulf News, Mona Haddad, marketing director at AppMahal, said that Sila is their second app and the first one was AppMahal, a social network application used to discover new apps with a 4.6 approval rating.
“Despite the fact that there are huge chat apps in the market, many regional apps in India and China have proved that a regional chat app is a must and necessary to every region, Sila is going to be the one for the Arab region,” she said.
Sila has been designed with the idea that Arab users have specific and different needs that should be matched. In order to meet the needs of daily communication, AppMahal has created localised stickers, emoji’s keyboard, and GIFs that represent life among the Arab population, she said.
“We wanted to introduce something that suits the culture of ours, so we took the chat part out of Appmahal and created a separate app for it, customised to the Arabian experience,” she said.
Major apps try to reach too large of a market share and sacrifice personalisation for globalisation, she said, and added that AppMahal is aware of the challenges they face in the Arab world such as adjusting the app to all operating systems and devices- even older and cheaper ones, connectivity issues because internet is more expensive in Arab countries.
The AppMahal has more than 3.5 million users and Sila has more than 800,000 users.
“When we added the private messaging feature in AppMahal, we have realised that app messaging increased significantly. So, we decided to develop a whole new app for instant messaging. It is developed and tailored-made for Arab region. I hope that Sila will be the strongest messaging app in the region,” she said.
AppMahal app was published three years ago and Sila around three months ago.
“We are getting around 60,000 new users every day for the Sila app and we will touch one million soon. Both the apps are available only on Android platform and she said the company is working very hard to launch it on Apple iOS platform during Ramadan,” she said.
The start-up has closed ‘Round A’ funding of $3 million from a Ramallah venture capitalist Siraj.
“Our business model right now is not to make money from the apps. Our strategy is to offer the best user experience and attain high monthly active users and then to monetise it,” she said.
She said the “Round A funding” hasn’t officially closed yet and is hoping for another VC to join our “Round B funding” in a bid to raise between $8 million to $12 million.
“We are going to add more features to the Sila app and our goal is to add one million active users every month. Given these numbers, it’s obvious that there is a market for an instant messaging platform,” she said.
